Page 62 of Haunted

“You were six. Nobody remembers—”

“That’s not it.” He’s still looking at the ceiling. “It isn’t gone. I stopped going in there. After the fire I stopped going into any of it, deliberately, because every single thing in there had my family in it. Every memory was of them. So I stopped remembering them. And I got very good at it.” He turns his head. “And it turns out that if you don’t go in for long enough, you can’t find the door.”

I don’t say anything.

“That’s the part that frightens me. I did it on purpose and now I can’t undo it. Whole years. My grandmother’s voice. What Elliott’s laugh sounded like.” He stops. “I can’t get any of it back.”

I put my hand flat on his chest, because there is nothing you can say to that.

“You, I never lost,” he says. “Not one single day.” He is quiet for a second. “I did try.”

Then he lifts his head and looks at me with something that isn’t quite a smile but is close. “So,” he says.

“So,” I say.

“Now that we’ve established that I’m not a monster for sleeping with you,” he says, “I have a practical question. How am I going to get to the DMV? My license is expired. The cop made that extremely clear.”

I stare at him patiently. He smiles very brightly at me. I arch my brow and let the silence linger way too long.

He bats his eyelashes. “Lance, would you please take me to the DMV?”

“And they say romance is dead.”

He laughs, and the sound lets me stand down for the first time since the boathouse. He touches my belly, tracing the line of hair below my navel, and even though I raise my eyebrows pointedly at him, it feels good, so I don’t tell him to stop.

“Are you sure you can get the time off work?”

“I just helped discover a dead body. I think they’ll give me a few days.”

“Actually, I discovered the dead body.”

“Fair point.” He stretches and stares at the ceiling. “How much does the DMV cost, anyway? I mean, I can open a US bank account, right? It won’t be that hard.” He frowns. “Oh. I need a valid ID. Well—passport. That still works, at least. It’s about the only document I own that does.”

“What really happened to your visa?”

He grimaces. “Oh, that’s a story. I filed in March. It should have taken six weeks.” He drags a hand down his face. “It’s been referred up to Delhi for clearance, because first they thought I was a journalist, and I dare you to try to explain to an elderly man from Uttar Pradesh what a travel vlogger is, how internet monetization happens, why I don’t have a regular income, and why I don’t have a press pass. That took four months and three trips to Delhi. Then, once I’d satisfied him that I wasn’t a journalist or involved in something more nefarious, he referred me to a new person. Who started my application again from the top. Because the name on my passport and the name I go by in my vlog are not the same, and you’d think that would be easy to explain. That restarted the entire process from scratch and I had to catch a plane. So now I have to prove to a department that hasn’t answered an email since August that Jonny Bishop and Parker Jonathan Bishop are the same person.”

I don’t laugh. But I want to so bad I can taste it.

“So I can go anywhere on earth,” he says, “except the one place I live.”

I successfully convert my look of obvious delight into one that I’m pretty sure looks like pained amusement, like if something really terrible and completely out of your control conspired to give you a wonderful gift at someone else’s expense. He eyes me suspiciously. “I prefer you smiling. That didn’t look so deranged, at least.”

I give up and stop pretending.

Jonny huffs. “Can you at least try not to look so happy about it? I have no home, no job, no bank account, and no future.”

I stare at him. “How do you not have a bank account?”

“Oh, I do! Just not here. You can’t open one in India on a tourist visa, so YouTube pays into a fintech app. It gives me a prepaid card that works at ATMs. Most of what I did in India was cash anyway—street food, rickshaws, guesthouses. You can live really well on cash there. I closed my American account years ago because the maintenance fees were eating me alive and I wasn’t using it. And my tourist visa only lets me stay for six months at a stretch, so every half-year I’m off to Nepal or Thailand or wherever, living out of a bag. It’s hard to build a financial life when you’re always in transit.”

I absorb this. “So your entire financial well-being is on one fintech app.”

“It’s a very good app.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

My fingers flex against the sheets. I rub my forehead. The man I’m lying next to has been running a business for nine years on a prepaid debit card. No bank account in this country. An expired license. A visa renewal that has been sitting in an office in Delhi since March. A life that bounces him out of India every six months. My finance degree is having a seizure.